OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/27335/FreeBSD_10_s_new_technologies_and_features
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Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572630
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572630Grrr, I'm so excited to dive into FreeBSD, but I feel like I can't have a good experience with it until pkg-ng is back up and working. Fri, 20 Sep 2013 18:50:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (drcouzelis)CommentsRE: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572631
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572631PC-BSD has pkgNG repos available for 9.1-RELEASE, 9.2-RELEASE, 9.1-STABLE, and 9.2-STABLE. I use them at home (PC-BSD rolling release) and at work (9.2-STABLE) without any issues.

The plan is to have full binary package repos available for 10.0-RELEASE. The infrastructure is in place, the initial builds are running, and they are tracking down the last few issues with ports that don't compile with Clang/LLVM.

IOW, if you wait until 10.0 is released, you can completely ignore the ports tree and never compile anything manually again.

Or, you can install 9.2 when it's released, and use alternative repos for now, and switch to the official repos in a little bit.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 18:57:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (phoenix)CommentsZFS Trimhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572632
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572632Better support of SSD drives ... nice!Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:03:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (lucas_maximus)CommentsRE: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572633
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572633PC-BSD has a good pkgng repository. Here's a good guide:

If you stop short of converting to a full PC-BSD system, you get an updated repo on you FreeBSD system.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:20:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentsComment by Drumhellarhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572634
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572634I submitted an article on FreeBSD a couple weeks ago, and have had nary a response from you guys. What's up?Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:23:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentsRE[2]: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572636
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572636

IOW, if you wait until 10.0 is released, you can completely ignore the ports tree and never compile anything manually again.

You actually can already do this with just the standard package tools. The default package location points a repo that has the packages that are current at the time of the release (Say, 9.1-RELEASE). These don't change, and are the same versions as the ports tree that is included on the install media.

There is also a pair of other repos, 9-CURRENT and 9-STABLE, with CURRENT being cutting edge and STABLE being a bit more settled-down. Currently, CURRENT and STABLE are the same, but this isn't always the point. If you point to STABLE, you get the same versions as found in the latest ports tree, with about a week or so of lag-time.

There is a minor problem with this, though. If you were to do pkg_add -r firefox, it'd look for a package All/firefox.tbz, which would be a symlink to, say, ../www/firefox-22.tbz. If the package gets updated to firefox-22.1.tbz, the symlink sometimes isn't updated completely (or might not be for some dependencies), and pkg_add will fail. If you point to the full and actual path, though, you won't have any problems.

Of course, you might still need the bsdadmin out of ports to make upgrading easier. These can be found elsewhere, though.

But, yeah, pkgng is a huge improvement. The traditional pkg tools are slow as molasses to install/remove packages, especially a bunch of them, while pkgng is quite fast.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:33:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentsComment by J-freebsd_98http://www.osnews.com/thread?572637
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572637I, for one, would maybe like to see someday a (port?) restoration of the legacy pkg (pre-pkgng) tools, as upgrades here often save a lot of time by CLI parsing of the +CONTENTS file(s), remedying duplicate installs by simply deleting an unwanted packages directory, etc. etc. Convenience over design, but at a more basic level.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:34:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (J-freebsd_98)CommentsRE[3]: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572638
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572638Except, none of those repos currently exist, due to the security incident, infrastructure shuffling, and switch to pkgng.

There are older pkg_install repos available for older releases. But nothing current. And nothing available for pkgNG.

IOW, if one wants a completely ports-tree-free, compile-free system using binary packages and pkgNG, one needs to either wait for 10.0 or use alternative repos.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:36:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (phoenix)CommentsRE: Comment by J-freebsd_98http://www.osnews.com/thread?572639
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572639(posted in the wrong spot)Edited 2013-09-20 19:41 UTCFri, 20 Sep 2013 19:40:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentsRE[4]: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572640
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572640The binary repos are back, and have been since May 14th.

I don't think there was ever a pkgng repo planned for 9.x, since such large changes tend to be saved for major releases. Using the regular pkg tools currently works exactly as I described.

Also, like I said, there's always the PC-BSD repos if you want stock software. If you pull KDE from the PC-BSD repo, you won't get the PC-BSD customized version - you'll get stock KDE as if you built it in ports.Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:46:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentspkgNGhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572642
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572642The pkgNG website (https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng) has this message:

Availability of pkgs for Download

As a consequence of the security incident on 11th November 2012, for the time being pre-compiled packages for pkgng are not available from any official FreeBSD repository. The test repository pkgbeta.freebsd.org contains only a copy of pkg-1.0.X.txz in order to facilitate the bootstrap procedure for enabling pkgng on a new system. Availability of the new official pkg build cluster has been set back, as resources have instead been devoted to cleaning up after the compromise, and the distributed package building software is being heavily revised for improved security.

Target dates for when service may be resumed have not been released. In the mean time, pkgng users are advised to investigate tools such as poudriere or tinderbox.

Those are primarily Mandatory Access Control and Capability-based security frameworks, which FreeBSD has had starting with the 5.x series nearly a decade ago.

It also has Sun's Basic Security Module API, in the form of OpenBSM (which started at Apple for MacOS X), which provides a capable security audit system.Sat, 21 Sep 2013 05:25:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Drumhellar)CommentsLots of smaller featureshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572690
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572690There are lots of smaller features that are not mentioned there and that are really nice: improved DTrace, read-only support fot ext4 extents, ipfilter update. Also the read-only support for XFS is gone.

The picture will only be complete when the Release Notes are out.Sat, 21 Sep 2013 15:25:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (pfgbsd)CommentsUSB Audio 2.0 questionhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572692
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572692

Hardware Support

USB Audio 2.0 â" USB Audio support has been revamped, supporting new devices, higher bandwidth support and increased sampling frequency (may not make it in final release)

Perhaps someone running CURRENT can chime in on this. How well does it work? Also, what sound system/modules does FreeBSD use as default these days? OSS?

Excuse the noobish question, but I'm mostly an OpenBSD user on teh BSD side, and it's been some years since I last used FreeBSD or any of it's variants. Reason I'm asking is because I've been unsuccessful getting audio piped out to my DAC (which works fine with ALSA/Linux) with any of the BSDs.

On a side note, incoming Thunderbolt support should be nice for those Mac owners that run virtualized FreeBSD sessions in OS X, though I still wonder if thunderbolt has a place outside the pro graphic/audio market, considering the prices. I've not met any "normal user" that has even considered buying a thunderbolt device of any sort.Sat, 21 Sep 2013 15:36:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (gan17)CommentsRE: USB Audio 2.0 questionhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572699
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572699Sorry to reply only to part, .. I found that v9 installed SND drivers as part of the GENERIC kernel (maybe not the case in v8, for example). As I recompiled without them, I tested and used OSS drivers (audio/oss) before reverting to the default command-loadable ones, and posted HowTo in the FreeBSD forums for the non-default (more commands to implement the sound, but maybe/maybe not more advantageous than the default sound drivers. [ both should not be loaded concurrently]. I am sure a search of the forum will mention USB audio in v9, and it should not change much to v10 unless it is in the wiki under the new release or what's new pages ...Sat, 21 Sep 2013 16:33:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (J-freebsd_98)CommentsRE: Comment by Berend de Boerhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572725
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572725"Fortunately nothing like apparmor in FreeBSD yet."

IOW, if you wait until 10.0 is released, you can completely ignore the ports tree and never compile anything manually again.

Nope

You can have binary packages, but there will probably non-existent packages like LAME.

Also, if You need FFMPEG with LAM and FAAC support you still need to recompile it.Mon, 23 Sep 2013 06:27:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (vermaden)CommentsRE: Lots of smaller featureshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572808
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572808

read-only support fot ext4 extents

Ext4 write support is already possible with sysutils/fusefs-ex4fuse port using FUSE.Mon, 23 Sep 2013 06:30:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (vermaden)CommentsRE: Comment by drcouzelishttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572825
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572825I don't see nothing wrong with the ports collection. I actually preferred it. It took me a while to get used to Linux way of doing things. Especially compiling a kernel, it is so much easier with freebsd.Mon, 23 Sep 2013 12:53:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (missingxtension)CommentsDoeshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572826
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572826FreeBSD still run Linux binaries faster than Linux do?Mon, 23 Sep 2013 13:35:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (Kebabbert)CommentsRE: Comment by Berend de Boerhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572830
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572830Search for "capsicum" and "mandatory access control" along with "freebsd" and you'll get tonnes of information on the FreeBSD way of doing AppArmor/SELinux stuff.Mon, 23 Sep 2013 15:25:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (phoenix)CommentsRE[2]: Lots of smaller featureshttp://www.osnews.com/thread?572863
http://www.osnews.com/thread?572863

"read-only support fot ext4 extents

Ext4 write support is already possible with sysutils/fusefs-ex4fuse port using FUSE. "

If you mean ext4fuse, it is read-only.

The FreeBSD kernel driver has received many improvements for this release and should be much faster than the fuse version.Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:10:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (pfgbsd)CommentsRE[2]: Comment by Berend de Boerhttp://www.osnews.com/thread?573104
http://www.osnews.com/thread?573104Why?Tue, 24 Sep 2013 19:49:00 GMTdonotreply@osnews.com (zima)Comments